The nine-site national Collaborative study On the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) funded by National Institute of Alcohol and Alcoholism (NIAAA) aims to identify and characterize genes that affect the susceptibility to develop alcohol dependence and related phenotypes. COGA is applying multiple strategies for genetic research. The most densely affected, multiplex alcoholic families were used in a multi-wave family-based linkage study. 2,283 out of 2,459 individuals from 262 families were genotyped using microsatellite markers in Wave I and Wave II (data denoted as Map03MS) ( Table 4 ) [54]. At Wave III, another 1,442 out of 2,106 individuals from 312 families were selected for microsatellite genotyping by the Mammalian Genotyping Service (MGS) from Marshfield Clinic (data denoted as MarshfieldMS) ( Table 4 ). Combined data from all three waves are denoted as LinkageMS in this study. COGA also has high throughput GWAS data with over 1 million SNP markers from 1,884 independent individuals, generated by the Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR) (data denoted as CIDRSNP) (Edenberg et al., 2010). The GWAS data include 566 mutual individuals chosen from the LinkageMS families.
